Polish Holocaust hero and ‘sole reason’ for UK family’s existence is honoured

A Polish man will be posthumously honoured this weekend for his role in hiding a wartime Jewish businessman from the Nazis and helping to ensure he could have a flourishing family in Britain.

Jozef Wegrzynowski spent many months during the Second World War providing food, shelter and money to Max Ostro, who was on the run after escaping from a train carrying him to the Treblinka death camp.

Ostro’s life was saved because he was able to arrange for him to be placed instead into a slave labour camp, where conditions were harsh but there was no systematic extermination programme.

On Sunday Wegrzynowski will be named as Righteous Among the Nations, the honour bestowed by Yad Vashem upon non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust.

After the war Ostro took his family jewellery business to Britain, where he had a family including two children and many grandchildren.

His son told Jewish News that his family and its future generations “only exist because of the actions of people who took personal risks to save my father’s life in the Holocaust”.

In latter stages of the war Max Ostro spent several months in hiding at Wegrzynowski’s house.

For several weeks between November 1944 and January 1945, he was hidden in an unmarked outdoor grave as the Nazis searched for him in the midst of their retreat from the advancing Red Army.

Wegrzynowski delivered a small amount of food and water to him on a weekly basis — at great risk to his own life, as he would have been shot as a traitor if caught.

He is credited with saving his life along with Witold Trzeciakowski, who protected the Ostro family fortune and made arrangements to send money to Ostro.

Speaking this week, businessman and philanthropist Maurice Ostro said that his father had been highly reluctant after the war to speak about the Holocaust and his own ordeals, saying: “I don’t want to live in a grave. I’ve done that.”

But he said he had contacted Yad Vashem even though it might have been against his father’s wishes because, with the Holocaust passing out of living memory, it was important to pass his story on.

“Because of the Ukraine crisis, I decided that now more than ever that people remember the amazing impact they can have on the world for their own actions,” Maurice Ostro said.

“Here’s one man – Witold Trzeciakowski – and another – Jozef Wegrzynowski – and these two people did an act: Witold sending money; Jozef, finding food with that money and giving it to a Jew.

“They were doing things that were just the right thing to do and the reason I think with the Ukraine crisis it’s critical to put across the message is that when stuff happens in the world, everyone one of us had the ability to make a difference.”

Sunday’s ceremony will take place in Warsaw at the start of the annual March of the Living.

It will be attended by members of the Ostro family as well as two great-grandchildren of Jozef Wegrzynowski and the daughter-in-law and grandson of Witold Trzeciakowski.

The Chief Rabbi of Poland and the Israeli Ambassador will also make presentations.

The event, which begins at 8.30pm Polish time (7.30pm UK), will be live streamed on the March of the Living UK Facebook page.